Video management systems are generally arranged to handle recordings from a system of monitoring cameras monitoring, for example, a premises, an office complex, a shopping mall, a public transport system, and the like. The video management systems are often managed by a team of security operators who uses the captured video footage for live surveillance as well as for forensic search of video sequences connected to an incident of interest. Incidents of interest to search for in the recorded video sequences may be of various nature, for example, a bus crashing into a parked car, a robbery at a bank, a fight between two persons, someone leaving a suitcase at a platform and the like.
It is a tedious and time consuming task for a security operator to manually go through video recordings searching for a particular incident of interest as there are typically large amounts of video footage to go through. Even if the time period of the incident is at least roughly known, an hour of recorded video footage will still take an hour to go through in real-time playback pace and there are typically video footage from more than one camera to go through when searching for recorded video sequences of interest from a system of monitoring cameras.
A lot of the recorded video footage is typically from static scenes where nothing happens, (e.g., night time surveillance of a super-market where nothing normally happens most of the time but then there might be a burglar that passes by one of the cameras for a very short period of time). There is the possibility of fast forwarding the playback and hence increase the playback pace, but in that case passages of interest might also easily be missed due to higher playback speed, and especially details of interest such as, for example, a shadow moving in the periphery of the camera view.
There is also the possibility to use video analytics to identify incidents of interest from video footage. However, it will typically be a complex and time consuming problem to configure and apply a video analysis rule to aid in the forensic search for a specific incident as there are many different types of incidents that are difficult to generalize and define in a common way, in a lot of incidents of interest it may also be difficult to exactly define what is the distinguishing attributes to look for before the actual incident is found in the video footage. Further improvements to video playback methods are hence needed.